Any scientists, mathematicians, or engineers here?

Just curious, what science/math/engineer field are you studying? And how many of you have already obtained your degrees?

I'm studying to be a clinical microbiologist. Plan to pursue a master's after a b.s. Seeing that our populations keep exploding and new viruses keep popping out out of nowhere...should be a great career to go into

I'll be returning to college this fall (I was kicked out of the last college I attended). I'll be majoring in mathematics, but I haven't determined the exact area of study I will focus on. Regardless of what area I do chose, I'll definitely be pursuing graduate study.

Hah, don't push your luck. Most of the people here are liberal arts fags trying to make some use of their useless degree by waxing philosophical about heavy metal on the internet. That or they haven't even started college yet.

My degree (BA in Geography - Resource Management) was intended as a loophole to get into interesting and useful professions without all the prerequisite coursework in calculus and chemistry required for actual science degrees. Guess that makes me a lazy dullard, or something. This degree, along with extra courses in GIS (computer cartography) has put me in position for field technician positions in summer, and GIS tech positions in winter. I'm currently employed by a soil and water conservation district to survey an archeological site in interior Alaska. In the past, gainful employment has seen me tracking mountain goats, making mass balance profiles on melting glaciers, producing a land cover map for a national park, ...and working graveyard shifts in convenience stores post-graduation... Keeps things interesting!

It's kind of a long and uninteresting story. Basically, in the first week of school I violated the campus speech codes and the student oath by making what the school determined to be "offense and threatening statements." It was then decided that I was not the type of student that they wanted attending their school.

Failed out of environmental engineering in 07 and will likely fail out of conservation biology at the end of this semester.retrospective on causal thought processes: Studying sucks, copious bong hits and sitting alone in dorm room listening to metal is a much better alternative-+Oh Noes, degree isn't magically completing itself, another cone and spinning pentagram again will fix everything++Oh shits, nullifying brain activity and avoiding power process is magnifying deep seated self loathing, affirms preexisting notion that failure is inevitable and is used to justify giving up without even trying+++Depression and negative behaviours manifest, reliance on cannabis as reality avoidance mechanism- consumption increases reinforcing deleterious cognition

Regular meditation, curtailing intoxication, a diet high in fibre and exercising the will to power are doing wonders, but I've failed too much assessment to pass most of my subjects. Maturity is borne of experience, sure would have been nice If I'd attained some earlier in life...

Amazing discovery of the day: If you open an mp3 file in wordpad or notepad, basically it gets represented as text (though I’m told by computer programmer types that the range of symbols is not quite large enough). If you copy this text and paste it into a new txt file, then save it, you can play it back as an mp3 and most of the sound data is intact. This means that if you memorized the textual characters you could, theoretically, sit down at a computer and “type.” a song. Imagine if humans learned to understand this textual language so that one could “type” a masterpiece painting, or type a song with a specific vocalist singing. In a certain sense you could “type” dead people back to life by representing their voice. I suppose theoretically you could even “type” the genetic data of a human, though you would need a good simulator program (maybe a new version of The Sims?). Perhaps if you had the right kind of printer you could even type and “print” homosapiens.

To those with proper degrees: does this make sense / would it be theoretically possible?

The music is saved in a sequence of 1's and 0's, a text editor just knows how to read these 1's and 0's a certain way :/ its just how it was programmed to read this information.

By taking the information used to store a painting or the sequence of human DNA as in your example, you would probably be able to convert it into a song, although it wouldnt be recognisable as anything, the underlying mathematics used to store the data would not match those of music.

you could type a song, but it would take too long, and you may as well just record or synthesize the sound yourself.

and no, you can't bring dead people back to life, you would just be representing information of them in a certain way...

Expanding on Orange's explanation, by changing the file extension, you just change what programs can view the file. It is not meant to be converted to .txt or any word processing format, because .mp3 files store more than just the song, but also song information, such as artist, ratings, album, etc. and changing this data destroys the integrity of the file and you likely will not be able to play it. In all honesty, you should just use programs that are designed to create music files, otherwise you will corrupt the file. I believe the language you're talking about is binary, octal, hexadecimal, etc. etc. convert into ASCII (which is what a word processor does to the file). This machine code was used back in the early 50's (and earlier) for computer programming, before programming languages like FORTRAN or assembly languages, etc. were developed. . . Or something like that.

To get back on topic, this isn't my area of specialty -- I'm currently in the middle of my second year of environmental engineering.